Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
13d ago
No one who is suffering politically likes to be told "actually you have no enemies, it's all an illusion, move along nothing to see here". It's natural to want someone to blame. (And frequently, there is someone who can be blamed to at least some degree.)
When you look at:
- The mass exodus of porn from tumblr
- Patreon instituting overtly political/moralistic guidelines for what content is allowed on the platform (they went out of their way to say hypnosis porn is banned, what the fuck)
- Total porn ban on all the biggest social media sites, facebook, instagram, tiktok, youtube
- The extreme difficulty of getting adult content published on major distribution channels like Steam or the Apple/Google app stores
- The desexualization of media in general due to the rise of wokeism, particularly the sorts of casual non-explicit sexualization that would be appealing to a straight male audience
- Japanese adult game developers increasingly ditching porn altogether to comply with regulations on mobile app stores and to gain access to the Chinese market, which also has its own strict regulations
you start to get the impression that a lot of people really don't like porn. It's not an isolated incident. And this is all before we even get into the laws against loli manga in many countries, people literally going to jail for lines on paper that clearly depict fictional characters.
Some of these have nothing to do with payment processors either. I receive no payment for putting up free porn on tumblr or youtube, but I'm still not allowed to do it.
The porn artists might be more inclined to believe the "it's just a totally random confluence of business factors" theory if they felt that public sentiment was on their side. If they felt that people really did believe in a principle of free artistic expression, and it really was just the credit card companies who couldn't get on board for some reason. But you ask people about these porn bans and the typical response you get is something along the lines of "of course, this content is totally perverse and obscene, and probably harmful to children and society too, and no one in their right minds would actually want to be caught paying for or even looking at this stuff, and certainly no one will miss it if it's gone... but it's not being banned because people don't like it, don't be silly, it's really just those pesky chargebacks, sorry kid it's just business..."
Do you see why porn artists might get suspicious? Where are their allies? Who is actually willing to support them?
Granted, blaming it on Evangelicals is also wrong. But the basic impulse to see it as a political issue rather than a purely economic one is, I think, quite correct.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
13d ago
Ukraine suspends consular services for military-age men in draft push
Ukraine on Tuesday suspended consular services for military-age male citizens until May 18, criticising Ukrainians abroad who it said expected to receive help from the state without helping it battle for survival in the war against Russia.
Hundreds of thousands of military-age Ukrainian men are living abroad and the country faces an acute shortage of troops against a larger, better-equipped enemy nearly 26 months since Russia's full-scale invasion.
[...]In practice, the suspension means military age men now living abroad will be unable to renew expiring passports or obtain new ones or receive official documents such as marriage certificates.
It's been interesting to watch the reaction from Western pro-Ukrainians to Ukraine's sweeping new mobilization orders. The prevailing sentiment seems to be "that's a tragedy, and obviously the draft shouldn't exist to begin with, but what can be done?" Suggesting that it would be better to negotiate a peaceful end to the conflict is outside the Overton window. It's a foregone conclusion that Ukraine must fight to the last man.
There is something hellishly dystopian about fleeing to another country, possibly even across the ocean, and your country of birth is still trying to pull you back. Particularly because women are given a free pass. It's natural to feel like there should be some cost associated with the privilege of not having to be forcibly conscripted to fight against an invading army.
This raises questions about Ukraine's ability to keep their fighting force well-staffed going forward, and also questions about the morale of Ukrainian soldiers. Every conflict has some number of draft dodgers, but I wonder if there are any hard stats about whether dodgers are particularly overrepresented in this conflict? That could help adjudicate the question of whether the Ukrainian resistance is an authentic homegrown phenomenon, or if it's largely being sustained by Western pressure.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
15d ago
I mean, what do these people hope to accomplish? Like what are their demands?
Can't you ask that about most protests?
I never really "got" protesting. I have to assume that the main purpose of it is just to serve as a social activity for the protesters themselves. If it's something like workers going on strike, where the group in question actually has some leverage, that's a different story, but a bunch of random people just gathering in public to "support a cause"? It doesn't make a lot of sense.
Sometimes I've heard it justified as a way of building positive publicity. You're supposed to see the police or other authority figures mistreating the protesters, and that's supposed to make you support their cause more. But usually it just makes me end up supporting the cause less, because the protesters are obnoxious. Their own actions make me want them to lose more.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
27d ago
Indians consistently overestimate how much time we spend thinking about them.
At least in America, in terms of the groups that grab headlines and really dominate the political discourse, it's blacks, South Americans, Chinese because of the geopolitical tensions, Jews to some extent recently because of the Palestine conflict, Muslims too because of the same conflict although not as much as during the Bush years or even the peak ISIS years... Indians are honestly way down there, most Americans don't have much of an opinion on them outside of some vague stereotypes.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1d ago
Women carry around a nagging anxiety that their own existential authenticity is always in doubt; there is an unresolvable neurosis over the possibility of being reduced to a mere biological function. The fear is that all the rhetoric about girl bosses and shatter-prone glass ceilings and a more egalitarian future really is, at the end of the day, just rhetoric, no matter how many Emmy Noethers and Angela Merkels and Jane Austens dot the pages of our history books.
A man may be a scoundrel and an outcast and a criminal, but at least these are proper symbolic roles - they require the attribution of human agency. If your identity is fully coextensive with the biological function of reproduction, then the worry is that this makes one more object than human - more like the scaffolding that supports the stage, rather than a proper player in the drama.
This is why the threat of "objectification" carries such a sharp sting. I would be so bold as to speculate that this is, in some sense, a trans-historical feature of femininity as such - the division between the human as rational agent and the human as embodied biological organism almost demands a group of people who fall on the wrong side of the divide - and therefore cannot be assuaged by any amount of empirical evidence that women are in fact capable of leading much the same types of lives and engaging in the same sorts of intellectual pursuits as men are.
I'm not exactly sure where your disagreement with curious_straight_ca is.
It's not really an either/or kind of thing, it's both. The social contagion theory is definitely a big part of the story. Clearly the trans phenomenon spreads memetically. But it's also an undeniable fact that some people just feel a spontaneous desire to be the opposite gender, even without prior exposure to pro-trans material. Some percentage of men will reliably develop fantasies about being a woman, a desire to wear women's clothes, etc, without any apparent external cause, just like some percentage of men will turn out homosexual with no identifiable cause.
Certainly the memetic spread and institutionalized support for trans people takes the phenomenon to new heights that were undreamed of in past decades. You can't really develop a spontaneous desire for taking hormones and getting SRS if you don't even know that's a possibility, for example. But any complete theory of the phenomenon has to include the understanding that at least some aspects of it are indeed "natural".
You also can't leave the notion of "memetic spread" entirely unexamined - why is this such a particularly virile and attractive meme? How did it spawn its own subculture with all sorts of forums and discords and irl groups and a surprisingly long tradition of its own art and creative writing? If the government decided to go all in on the finger amputation meme, could it gain the same level of traction? I don't think so.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
27d ago
Brief thoughts on religion
My mother is a devout practicing Catholic. I have never once had the courage to tell her that I stopped believing in God long ago. She’s asked me a few times over the years if I still believe; presumably it’s apparent from my disinterest in the Church that I don’t. I just lie, I tell her “yes of course”, and that’s the end of it, for a time. I hate thinking of what it will be like to face her on her deathbed. I’m sure she’ll ask me again, at the very end - will I still lie? I don’t want to inflict that kind of pain on her. I can put on a boisterous face in my writing at times, but when it comes to anything that actually matters, I’m a coward. (Writing is the medium most closely associated with subterfuge, with masquerade, with the protean synthesis of new identities - in no other instance can we so directly assume a voice and a habit of mind that is not our own.)
I seem to no longer be capable of approaching religion as anything but an aesthetic phenomenon. I admire religions the way you might admire clothes in a shop window; I judge them by how well they comport with my own notions of how reality should ideally function. There is something primally compelling about Judaism; what other god has commanded such authority? What other god has commanded such, not only fear, but such intellectually refined fear, a fear that carries with it all the oceanic vastness and eerie serenity of the desert’s evening sky? Christianity too is fascinating, as possibly the most beautiful and compelling image of humility and forgiveness in world history. Here we have the physical incarnation of the Hegelian thesis of the contradiction inherent in all things (“that terrible paradox of ‘God on the cross’”). It’s a shame about the ending, though; it smacks of a heavy-handed editor, as though the Hollywood execs thought the original idea was too much of a downer for a mass market audience. Things should have ended on Good Friday - “God is dead and we killed him” - that’s how you have a proper tragedy and proper pathos, only then do you have the ultimate sacrifice and the ultimate crime.
My only experience of religion now is through the collection of dictums and niceties. Lacan: “God is unconscious”. Derrida: “The only authentic prayer is one that you expect will not be heard”. Little bits of “insight porn” that make me go “ah, that certainly is how things should be! Wouldn’t it be lovely if that were true!” But can I actually believe it’s true? Probably not.
One of my favorite commentators (a lapsed Catholic himself, incidentally) on Lacan once relayed an anecdote:
”You know, I always have been kind of terrified of flying. So one time I was on this plane, terrified, and as we’re about to take off I turned to the guy next to me and said, ‘boy it would really suck if the plane just fell out of the sky and crashed, huh?’ And the guy looked at me like I had lobsters coming out of my ears and he said, ‘what are you crazy? You don’t say things like that! That’ll make it happen!’ I guess that is a pretty common superstitious way of thinking. If you say something, it’s more likely to happen. But I know that actually, the opposite is true. My God is the God of the signifier, so everything is upside down.”
Now that’s the kind of God that I could get on board with believing in! The God of the signifier, the God who turns everything upside down. Ancient commentators, in traditions as diverse as neoplatonism and Buddhism, recognized a problem: if God is perfect, unchanging, atemporal, mereologically simple, then how was it metaphysically possible for him to give rise to this temporal, dynamic, fallen, fractured creation? How did The One give rise to The Many? The orthodox answer is that “He did it out of love”. An alternative answer, whispered in heretical texts and under hushed breaths, is that it may not have been under His control at all. There was simply a “disturbance” in the force - nature indiscernable, source unknown (perhaps it’s simply built into the nature of things?). If I worship anything, it is The Disturbance. (Zizek gave a beautiful example of this - there was a scene in a horror film where a woman dropped dead while singing, but her voice didn’t stop, it just kept ringing out, disembodied. This is only momentarily shocking, something you as the viewer recover from rather quickly. But contrast this with a ballet where the recorded music stops playing and the dancers just keep on dancing, in complete silence - they don’t stop. There’s nothing supernatural about this, it’s perfectly physically realizable. But it’s far more unnerving, it feels like something that you simply shouldn’t be watching. This is The Disturbance, the Freudian death drive.)
I don’t think I’m alone in not being able to take the whole thing seriously. Statistics about declining church attendance have been cited ad nauseam; the few times I did attend mass in the last few years, the crowd was decidedly elderly. The burgeoning tradcath revolt among the Gen Z dissident right smacks of insincerity; they pantomime the words and rituals, but there’s no genuine belief. Andrew Tate’s conversion to Islam is an aesthetic-cum-financial move. Contemporary neopaganism is definitely an aesthetic phenomenon first and foremost (not to mention a sexual one - blonde 20-something Russian girls dressed all in white frolicking on the open fields of the steppe is a hell of a weltanschauung).
I’ve probably given the impression that the aesthetic is somehow opposed to the religious - that its purpose is to supplant authentic religious feelings as a synthetic substitute. Unable to believe in the old religions as we once did, we cast about and find that aesthetics is the next best thing, so we convert the church into a gallery and deify the Old Master painting (or, to use a more contemporary example, the TikTok influencer) instead of the body and blood. But nothing could be further from the truth. Authentic aesthetic feelings are, in a sense, the natural product of the religious sentiment. Art has been intimately tied up with magic since its inception, art as quite literally a summoning ritual, a protective charm to ward off bad luck, an offering to the gods. The separation of the priest, the witch doctor, and the poet is a relatively late historical development. Many of the earliest cave paintings were secluded in unreasonably deep parts of the cave, almost impossible to access, the only way to get there was by crawling on your stomach through dark narrow passageways where you could have easily risked injury or death - what would have driven people to do that, what purpose did they think they were fulfilling, why did they perceive a necessary link between art and trauma?
Attempts to give art a rational “purpose”, saying that it “teaches us moral lessons” or “provides entertainment”, all sound so lame because they are so obviously false. The purpose of art is to bring us into communion with The Beyond - that’s it, that’s the long and short of it. To make art is to attempt to do magic, and to be an artist is to be a person who yearns strongly for this Beyond, at least on an unconscious level. If the artist does not ultimately believe in the possibility of transcending this realm, he simply dooms himself to frustration - but the fundamental animating impulse of his actions does not change. The aesthetic is what remains when the vulnerable overt metaphysical claims of religion have been burned away: under threat of irrationality, I am compelled to reject God, free will, and the immortality of the soul, but you cannot intrude on the private inner domain of my sentiment and my desire.
It is here that I would like to begin an examination of the question as to whether the aesthetic feeling too, like the properly religious feeling before it, could one day decline into irrelevance; whether the conditions might one day be such that its last embers are extinguished. There are indications that this may be the case. But it would be unwise to attempt to answer this question without a thorough historiographical and empirical preparation. After all, we are far from the first to raise this question - it was already raised as early as ancient Rome (in a fictional novel admittedly, known as the Satyricon, but, fiction always draws from something real):
Heartened up by this story, I began to draw upon his more comprehensive knowledge as to the ages of the pictures and as to certain of the stories connected with them, upon which I was not clear; and I likewise inquired into the causes of the decadence of the present age, in which the most refined arts had perished, and among them painting, which had not left even the faintest trace of itself behind. “Greed of money,” he replied, “has brought about these unaccountable changes. In the good old times, when virtue was her own reward, the fine arts flourished, and there was the keenest rivalry among men for fear that anything which could be of benefit to future generations should remain long undiscovered. […] And we, sodden with wine and women, cannot even appreciate the arts already practiced, we only criticise the past! We learn only vice, and teach it, too. What has become of logic? of astronomy? Where is the exquisite road to wisdom? Who even goes into a temple to make a vow, that he may achieve eloquence or bathe in the fountain of wisdom? […] Do not hesitate, therefore, at expressing your surprise at the deterioration of painting, since, by all the gods and men alike, a lump of gold is held to be more beautiful than anything ever created by those crazy little Greek fellows, Apelles and Phydias!”
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
14d ago
I will ask the same question that I've asked repeatedly: if porn is so bad and the NWO wants to get you addicted to it, then why do they make it so very difficult to distribute? Why does it seem like they're clamping down harder over time? Even pornhub can't take credit cards anymore, they only accept ACH transfers and crypto.
Porn (in the very broadest sense of the term) is one of the only authentically countercultural genres of art today, as evidenced by the severe institutional restrictions it faces. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
24d ago
Paging @2rafa or anyone else who can explain to me what an investment banking analyst actually does: AI is coming for Wall Street: Banks are reportedly weighing cutting analyst hiring by two-thirds (paywalled for me on desktop but it's loading fine on mobile):
Incoming junior Wall Street analysts could be in danger of losing their jobs to AI, sources within banks told the New York Times.
Big firms are reportedly mulling whether to pull back on hiring new analysts as Wall Street leans more heavily on AI, several people familiar with the matter at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and other banks told the publication this week.
Incoming classes of junior investment-banking analysts could up being cut as much as two-thirds, some of the people suggested, while those brought on board could fetch lower salaries, on account of their work being assisted by artificial intelligence.
I don't know how to evaluate the claims in the article because I have little understanding of what a banking analyst actually does on a day to day basis. How much of it requires "thought" (not thought of incredible complexity and originality, but thought nonetheless) and how much of it is just plugging numbers into Excel in a relatively formulaic fashion?
In general I lean towards being skeptical of these claims, especially in domains where I have little expertise, because the dominant pattern of the last 2 years is that people who don't know much about X tend to overestimate how good AI is at X.
If I compare this to a domain where I do have some knowledge (computer programming), most of the tests that people use to demonstrate LLMs' coding ability aren't particularly representative of what programmers do on a daily basis. Sitting down and opening a new blank file and "writing code to do X" is certainly part of the job, and it can be a bigger or smaller part of the job depending on what type of organization you're at and what type of project you're working on etc, but it's not the whole job (for some programmers, it's a very small part of it!)
So I'd like people with more domain knowledge to weigh in on what aspects of these financial jobs are liable to be automated today and what the forecast for the field is like.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
4d ago
I mean, if the lab meat was literally identical in every way to real meat, then sure, I’d eat it. In practice though, I’d imagine it’s more like AI-generated media: the difference in quality is noticeable, but certain factions downplay the differences for political reasons.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
5d ago
It's a bit odd to me that everyone is so confident in their answers (regardless of which answer they choose).
I don't feel like I have a good enough baseline intuition about how dangerous bears are to answer with confidence. How likely is the average bear to attack you? Is it possible to outrun a bear? This is far outside my domain of expertise.
I certainly understand why a lot of women would say "bear", even if they might ultimately be mistaken.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
7d ago
Zizek's new piece in Compact: Happy Birthday Kant, You Lousy Sadist (paywalled, but you can read the whole thing on reddit here):
Is there a line from Kantian ethics to the Auschwitz killing machine? Are the Nazis’ concentration camps and their mode of killing—as a neutral business—the inherent terminus of the enlightened insistence on the autonomy of reason? Is there some affinity between Kant avec Sade and Fascist torture as portrayed by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film version of 120 Days in Sodom, which transposes the story into the dark days of Mussolini’s Salò republic?
The link between Sade and Kant was first developed by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the famous Excursion II (“Juliette, or Enlightenment and Morality”) of the Dialectics of Enlightenment. Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s fundamental thesis is that “the work of Marquis de Sade displays the ‘Reason which is not led by another agency,’ that is to say, the bourgeois subject, liberated from a state of not yet being mature.” Some 15 years later, Lacan (unaware of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s version of the argument) also developed the notion that Sade is the truth of Kant, first in his Seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1958-59), and then in an écrit of 1963.
In typical Zizek fashion, he bounces between multiple different ideas in a rapid fire stream of consciousness style, so there are a lot of different threads here that you could grab and run with. Some of our resident anti-enlightenment posters and Christian posters may find something productive in Adorno and Horkheimer's diagnosis of the ethical situation of modernity:
Sade announced the moment when, with the emergence of bourgeois Enlightenment, pleasure itself lost its sacred-transgressive character and was reduced to a rationalized instrumental activity. That is to say, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, the greatness of Sade was that, on behalf of the full assertion of earthly pleasures, he not only rejected any metaphysical moralism, but also fully acknowledged the price one has to pay for this rejection: the radical intellectualization-instrumentalization-regimentation of sexual activity intended to bring pleasure. Here we encounter the content later baptized by Herbert Marcuse’s “repressive desublimation”: After all the barriers of sublimation, of cultural transformation of sexual activity, are abolished, what we get isn’t raw, brutal, passionate, satisfying animal sex, but on the contrary, a fully regimented, intellectualized activity comparable to a well-planned sporting match.
There is much that could be said about Kant's continuing influence on thought and politics. Putin has expressed admiration for him, for example. But probably the biggest point of interest to a general audience here will be Zizek's remarks on Trump near the end of the essay:
Things are similar with the new rightist populism. The contrast between Trump’s official ideological message (conservative values) and the style of his public performance (saying more or less whatever pops up in his head, insulting others, and violating all rules of good manners) tells a lot about our predicament: What sort of world do we inhibit, in which bombarding the public with indecent vulgarities presents itself as the last barrier to protect us from the triumph of the society in which everything is permitted and old values go down the drain? Trump is not a relic of the old moral-majority conservatism—he is to a much greater degree the caricatural inverted image of postmodern “permissive society” itself, a product of this society’s own antagonisms and inner limitations. [...] Trump’s obscene performances thus express the falsity of his populism: to put it with brutal simplicity, while acting as if he cares for the ordinary people, he promotes big capital.
I view this as one of a series of similar critiques coming out of the left in recent times, all of which center around the curious theme of rightists not acting rightist enough. There's been a growing concern on the left in the last few years that "the positions have switched", to a certain extent. Traits that used to be associated with the left - a general rebelliousness, experimentation with new ideas, a critique of established values and established authority (Covid is a big one here), and, yes, a certain willingness to engage in crass vulgarity from time to time, either as a political act or as simple good-spirited humor - have now become associated with the right. Meanwhile the left has become much more strongly associated with order, morality, and authority than they were in the post-war 20th century.
Reactions from leftists to this alleged reversal have been all over the spectrum: everything from panic ("they're stealing our bit! we have to get a handle on this!"), to Zizek's strategy here of denying the authenticity and veridicality of ostensibly rightist forms of rebellion and protest, to simple avowal ("yes, we are in charge, we are Justice, and that's a good thing actually").
Among commentators who believe this to be an authentic political phenomenon, the standard explanation is usually something like: well of course rightists were all for law and order when they were in charge. But now they're not so in charge anymore, so now they're learning the value of critique and skepticism, of free speech and civil liberties, and so forth. Similarly, leftists were in favor of free speech and questioning authority when it was beneficial to them, but now that their institutional capture is more entrenched, they don't need those things anymore.
But something about this explanation rubs me the wrong way. It paints a purely structural view of the formation of ideologies, and ignores the role of the individual completely; you will hold the views that you must based on your relational position to other political actors while taking into account your rational self interest, and that's that. But it becomes rather boring if you're always just looking for the self interest behind everything. The much more interesting and radical project is to find the abstract ethical commitments hiding behind apparent self interest.
There's always been an authoritarian streak to leftism going back to Marx - it's not something that they just happened to discover after attaining political ascendancy. It's reflected in how they govern their own private institutions, even when they don't have societal power. There was frequently internal strife at the Frankfurt school over this or that theorist not sufficiently holding to the party line. Leftist organizations at least as far back as the 80s were already using the progressive stack at group meetings to make sure that white men spoke last. Marxism itself claims that the end goal of the communist revolution is the dissolution of all antagonisms between individual and collective good - but the individual is right to be nervous about what processes the collective might institute to achieve this utopian vision.
Similarly, I believe in the possibility of a principled libertarianism that wouldn't immediately abandon all of its commitments as soon as it got hold of actual power. It's true that ideology always has to make affordances for reality at some point, but clearly, ideology has some impact on the reality of governance as well: I don't think you could, for example, explain the different political situations in the US and Russia entirely in terms of their different material and sociological conditions, with no reference whatsoever to the beliefs and motivations of the individual people who actually govern those countries.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
11d ago
You and Lewis are basically arguing against the weakest possible version of the anti-egalitarian position. No one thinks we should beat old men because they can't cross the street fast enough. That's just silly.
Wouldn't it be a lot more interesting and enlightening to argue against the strongest version of the position you disagree with? If you're going to critique anarchism, wouldn't you rather go after Bakunin and Kropotkin, instead of teenagers who just like to light shit on fire?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
26d ago
It's telling that far and away the most active threads this week were this thread, and Kulak's post about Indians.
You are the forum. If you think we talk about race too much, then write more posts and comments that aren't about race.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
12d ago
The main problem is that these guys think that under the perfect 'no Christian egalitarian shit' system, they would be LORDS AND MASTERS.
This is a criticism that frequently gets levied against rightists. And there's some truth to it. Some people really are just greedy sociopaths without any principles.
In an authentic anti-egalitarian politics, it ultimately doesn't matter much who the master is. We might have our own preferences of course, very strong preferences, but the final bedrock commitment is: if not me, then someone. Please let someone be beautiful and happy and triumphant, even if I am not. This is a moral impulse, the fulcrum on which everything turns. It's what separates a rightist from a grifter.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
18d ago
Israeli missiles hit site in Iran, ABC News reports
Israeli missiles have hit a site in Iran, ABC News reported late on Thursday, citing a U.S. official, days after Iran launched a drone strike on Israel in response to an attack at the Iranian embassy in Syria. Iran's Fars news agency said an explosion were heard at an airport in the Iranian city of Isafahan but the cause was not immediately known. Several Iranian nuclear sites are located in Isfahan province, including Natanz, centerpiece of Iran’s uranium enrichment program.
Iran’s response if Israel takes any further military action against it would be “immediate and at a maximum level,” Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian told CNN Thursday, as fears rise of an escalation of the conflict in the Middle East.
Hours after Amir-Abdollahian’s comments, an explosion was heard close to the airport in the central Iranian city of Isfahan, Iran’s semi-official FARS news agency reported early Friday, citing local sources.
Questions:
If you predicted a nothingburger - how are your predictions holding up? Is there still an offramp here where we can avoid further escalation, or could this evolve into a full on ground war? It's not clear to me if Israel's military could be stretched enough to handle a conventional war on multiple fronts.
Also, what does this indicate for the future of the US-Israel relationship? The US administration made it pretty clear to Israel that they didn't want them to retaliate against Iran (the going theory seemed to be that it would be bad for oil prices in an election year). Presumably Israel is feeling some real existential pressure right now if they're willing to openly defy the will of the US, one of their only consistent allies on the Palestine issue.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10d ago
If we were to fairly apply the progressive criteria of "disparate impact", then we would have to conclude that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
If a meritocratic hiring process results in a disproportionately low number of blacks getting hired, then the process is racist, regardless of the intentions behind the process or its alleged fairness. Similarly if anti-Zionism ends up materially hurting Jews, then it's anti-Semitic.
Of course no one on the progressive left will actually buy this argument, they'll just say "no we're doing anti-racism, and anti-racism can't be racist, duh" and leave it at that.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
18d ago
In general I'd prefer to see high quality, well written posts that address the substantive thesis of the parent post, instead of posts that nitpick on a single sentence. Regardless of political valence. A low effort drive-by comment that calls someone out for attacking white men is still a low effort drive-by comment.
In fact if there was an otherwise well written, well argued post that happened to include a jab at straight white men, I'd view that as a net positive overall, because it would be evidence that our ideological diversity situation is improving.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
20d ago
Or when their political future is now determined by the flood of migrants which repopulates the region, as opposed to their coethnics in Moscow.
I imagine that this is one of the wedges that drives different intuitions on this conflict - are you looking at it through a racial lens or a civic nationalist lens? Do you see Russians and Ukrainians, two peoples about as genetically and linguistically similar as you can get while still remaining distinct, or do you see Russia and Ukraine, two independent legal entities that are bound by the same ahistorical Rawlsian veil of ignorance as all other international actors?
In general I'm going to be a lot less concerned about an invading force that is ethnically and linguistically closer to me than one that is more distant. China invades the US, it's go time, Germany or the UK invades the US, eh I can probably live with that. Contra some of the other replies, "the continued existence of Ukraine" is in fact an abstract geopolitical goal of NATO, because the nation-state itself is an abstraction of relatively recent historical origin. Prosperity for oneself, for one's family and tribe, for the continued endurance of one's way of life - these desires are universal, but they are not equivalent to "the territorial integrity of one's nation-state". The latter is not a natural and universal human desire.
Of course race is certainly not the only thing that matters. I don't want to be ruled by white wokeists. But how many Ukrainians currently fighting are deeply opposed to Russia on ideological grounds because of their commitment to free speech/representative democracy/gay rights/whatever, and how many of them are just going with the flow because "Putin bad and this is what we're doing now"? How many of them are actually ideologically closer to the average Russian than the average American liberal? This is where the accusations of puppetry come from.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
3d ago
The recording industry managed to spread the idea that non-professionals singing is lame and embarrassing.
How did they accomplish this? What was the vehicle of delivery for this idea? Can you point me to specific sources?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
26d ago
I'd like to provide a response, but I legitimately don't know what you're talking about.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
13d ago
What, then, is something we don't believe but take action as though we do believe?
From Zizek's How To Read Lacan:
For decades, a classic joke has circulated among Lacanians to exemplify the key role of the Other’s knowledge: a man who believes himself to be a grain of seed is taken to the mental institution where the doctors do their best to finally convince him that he is not a grain but a man. When he is cured (convinced that he is not a grain of seed but a man) and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back trembling. There is a chicken outside the door and he is afraid that it will eat him. “Dear fellow,” says his doctor, “you know very well that you are not a grain of seed but a man”. “Of course I know that,” replies the patient, “but does the chicken know it?”
[...]Marx does not claim, in the usual way of Enlightenment critique, that critical analysis should demonstrate how a commodity – what appears a mysterious theological entity – emerged out of the “ordinary” real-life process; he claims, on the contrary, that the task of critical analysis is to unearth the “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” in what appears at first sight just an ordinary object. Commodity fetishism (our belief that commodities are magic objects, endowed with an inherent metaphysical power) is not located in our mind, in the way we (mis)perceive reality, but in our social reality itself. In other words, when a Marxist encounters a bourgeois subject immersed in commodity fetishism, the Marxist’s reproach to him is not “The commodity may seem to you to be a magical object endowed with special powers, but it really is just a reified expression of relations between people” but rather, “You may think that the commodity appears to you as a simple embodiment of social relations (that, for example, money is just a kind of voucher entitling you to a part of the social product), but this is not how things really seem to you. In your social reality, by means of your participation in social exchange, you bear witness to the uncanny fact that a commodity really appears to you as a magical object endowed with special powers.”
This type of phenomenon is the bread and butter of psychoanalysis: "I know very well that is not true, but nevertheless..."
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
6d ago
He was right that the AuthLeft/AuthRight horseshoe is in fact a circle
I assume that you are here claiming that the AuthLeft and AuthRight are really "the same" in some sense, in line with your previous posts on the subject.
On what criteria are you making this judgement?
I don't believe that your previous criteria used to support variations on this thesis in the past have been successful. You claimed that progressives and white identitarians are not distinct because they have no relevant "differences in policy, action, or outcome" beyond "which specific racial groupings should be favored". I responded by citing multiple substantial policy disagreements between them that were unrelated to race. (Admittedly though, it's not clear to me if "progressives" and "white identitarians" are the same thing as the "AuthLeft" and "AuthRight", and the arguments I outlined in the old thread may not be relevant to this new thesis. Please correct me if I'm going astray.)
You later claimed that the far left and far right are actually the same because they both endorse the same core philosophical commitment, specifically the commitment to the idea that "we know how to solve all our problems", presumably using Enlightenment reason or something equivalent. But I argued that there are leftists (communists, even) who deny this axiom.
So, what is the current criteria you endorse? Did I go wrong in one of my earlier arguments?
that both are progeny of the Enlightenment/Progressive movement
Maybe. (I'm somewhat skeptical of the idea of the "Enlightenment" as a discrete identifiable event.) But even granting this, I don't think it changes much. Things can be derived from the same source and still be different. Humans and apes are descended from a common ancestor, but they're not "the same" in any meaningful sense.
My memories are hazy but I think there was at least one teacher who read it aloud (I’m a couple years older than you).
Probably around 2014/2015 was the absolute cutoff point. Things changed very rapidly then, almost overnight. I distinctly remember around 2012, my gay friends thought I was very avant garde for knowing what the word “cisgender” meant. It’s crazy how far things advanced in just a year or two.
On the same topic, we had some mock debates in my high school civics class, and one of the topics was gay marriage. It was just taken for granted that it was something that reasonable people could disagree on, and you could take the anti- side without being perceived as a moral monster.
This is going to sound like edgy contrarianism for the sake of edgy contrarianism, so you'll have to take my word for it when I say that it's not:
I really don't care. And if you told me that counter-protesters were being funded by Israel, I wouldn't care about that either. In a conflict where moral fervor runs high, I am an advocate for the freedom to simply not care.
I'm just tired of the moral guilt tripping from both sides. If you want to criticize the protesters, criticize their tactics. There's plenty to criticize there. But their alleged ties to Hamas add nothing to the story for me. In general I have always felt that concerns over "foreign manipulation of political sentiment" were paranoia of the worst kind. If the governments of Russia or China or the US (organizations that have engaged in plenty of nasty unethical behavior in the past that could plausibly be classified as "terrorism") want to pay for a Times Square billboard and fund some student organizations to get their message out then I say let them. Free speech doesn't stop at our borders; I am for open trade in a global free market of ideas.
I can't reasonably bring myself to be invested in every ethnic and sectarian conflict that happens around the world, particularly when its direct impact on me seems rather limited. If the Sudanese Masalit want to organize protests in the US against the RSF then bully for them; whether they win or lose in their struggles, I'm not going to lose sleep either way. I view Israel-Palestine similarly: just another in a long series of ethnic conflicts in a region of the world that is known for being prone to violent ethnic conflicts.
In some sense I am forced to care, due to the generous financial aid that the US supplies to Israel. But my investment doesn't extend beyond that.
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